The semiconductor industry loses billions of dollars each year due to Intellectual Property (“IP”) infringement (See, e.g. Reference 30). A major facilitator of IP piracy attacks is reverse engineering. (See, e.g., References 28 and 33). Reverse engineering facilitates an attacker to identify the device technology used in an IC, an IC's functionality and/or its design. (See, e.g., Reference 33). Reverse engineering of an IC can involve depackaging, delayering and imaging the individual layers, annotating the images, and extracting the netlist of the design.
Many commercial ICs, such as Texas Instruments (“TI”) 4377401 baseband processor (see, e.g., Reference 34), and Intel's 22 nm Xeon processor (see, e.g., Reference 11), have been reported to have been successfully reverse engineered. Commercial, as well as open-source, tools, for revere engineering are available. (See, e.g., References 10 and 13). Although reverse engineering has been primarily devised for verifying commercial piracy and patent infringements, it can also be misused by an attacker to steal the IP. (See, e.g., Reference 28).
Thus, it may be beneficial to provide an exemplary system, method and computer-accessible medium providing secure IC camouflaging for minterm protection, which can overcome at least some of the deficiencies described herein above.